On April 21, Dr. Patty Limerick, Professor of History and Chair of the Board of the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado, gave us a rapid-fire summary of why historians can be helpful in some ways, but in others they are no help at all in seeing our way through troubled times. She started by suggesting that historians are under used and under-appreciated, in part because they are not sufficiently explicit in what they can offer and what they cannot offer. As part of her introduction, she talked about the goals of a grant she has recently received from the Mellon Foundation, under which she plans to gather a suite of young historians to brainstorm what practices historians need to be aware of in the uses of history and current research. She is trying to develop a strong case for why historians are useful, a framework for turning hindsight into foresight. As her first example, she talked about an excursion in March, 1965, in which a local realtor chartered a plane to take a cohort of people, mostly white Coloradans, from the CU law school to Selma, Alabama, to march with Martin Luther King, Jr. An effort to track down the currently living participants, including former Colorado governor Roy Romer, discovered that this trip was transformative in relationships between many of those participants.
With that introduction, she talked about three areas where historians can’t help at all. 1. They can’t identify trends from the past to look into the future – they can’t really even gauge our own times. 2. Although they can offer examples from the past that were arguably as bad as today, this rarely succeeds in offering a calming perspective. 3. They can’t position us so we can manipulate the future since the future is not a Ferris wheel and there is no real repetition: lessons from history may provide cautionary tales, but no guidance in handling the current situation.
On the other hand, historians can help in three areas. 1. They are the best situated profession to accent or identify implausibilities, improbabilities, unpredictabilities and potential contingencies. They can remind us that humans have persisted in the face of overwhelming adversity, using the examples of some of the American Indian tribes. 2. Although we tend to look at what is happening now rather than looking longer term, they can remind us that we are connected with the people both in the past and the future – the people of the past never leave us. She offered the example of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who, through their correspondence, thoroughly explored their differences. 3. They can turn our attention to people of the past to counteract our tendency to be uni-polar: examples from the American Indians included the 1830 act that put Indians on reservations, followed in 1832 by the organized effort to vaccinate the Indians against smallpox; white missionaries pushing back against the prejudice against the Indians; and one pioneering white woman overcoming her fear of Indians in developing a long-term friendship with a nearby Indian woman.
In response to a question, Dr. Limerick pointed out that, although historians cannot predict the future, they can use stories to evaluate the future. Thus, American Indian reaction to their pandemics is not a handbook for reaction to our pandemic, but it does offer insight. She did not offer her views on reparations to American Indian tribes, but she did point out that we do have treaties with the tribes which we more or less follow; we recognize the sovereignty of the Indian tribes; we provide the Indian Health Service; there are American Indian Tribal Colleges; and we, as a country, have ongoing relationships with the various tribes. There are no last chapters in these relationships or in any other relationships.
History does not tell us anything about separating from others.